INTRODUCTION

Developmental change evolves more slowly in early childhood,
the period from 2 to 6 years of age, than in infancy. During this
time, children lose their baby fat, their legs grow longer and
thinner, and they move around the world with increasing
dexterity. They present a bewildering patchwork of vulnerability
and ability, logic and magic, insight and ignorance. Children at
this age can talk in endless sentences but are keen listeners
when an interesting story is being told. Their present desires
can be curtailed with promises of later rewards, but they may not
necessarily accept the offered terms, negotiating for an instant
as well as a delayed reward. They develop theories about
everything, and these are constantly measured against the world
around them. However, despite their developing independence, 3-
year-olds need assistance from adults and siblings. They cannot
hold a pencil properly or string a loom or tie a knot. They do
not have the ability to concentrate for long periods of time
without a great deal of support, and they wander on tangents in
their games and conversations. Preschool children's thought
processes are characterized by great awareness; yet these islands
of sophistication exist in a sea of uncertainty. Children during
this period still understand relatively little about the world in
which they live and have little or no control over it. They are
prone to fears and they combat their growing self-awareness of
being small by wishful, magical thinking.

Traditionally, scientists have sorted these changes into
separate categories- cognitive, language, physical and social
development. Development in each of these areas, however, affects
and interacts with every other type. For example, cognitive
development creates the need for more sophisticated speech in
order to express new knowledge. Language development leads
children to master new words that capture new ideas. Physical
development allows them to perform more complicated tasks than
they could earlier, bringing them into greater social contact
with others. The information presented in the following sections
discusses some of the major achievements in each of these areas
of development.

PHYSICAL, MOTOR, AND PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

The preschool years are characterized by striking physical and
psychological changes. The brain and nervous system grow rapidly
and important parts of the brain attain their mature form. The
child continues to grow, from an average height of about 33
inches at age 2, to about 45 inches at age 6. Motor skills also
improve substantially. During this age children's baby fat
disappears, their legs lengthen, accounting for a larger
proportion of their height, and the relation of head size to body
size becomes more adult-like. As will be discussed in this
chapter, physical development of the young child corresponds
closely to changes in cognitive, language, and social behaviors.

Physical Development

In general children during the first two years of life
quadruple their weight and increase their height by two-thirds.
This rate slows down between 2 and 3 years when children gain
only about 4 pounds and grow only about 3.5 inches. Between the
ages 4 and 6, the increase in height slows still further and
children grow about 2.5 inches and gain 5 to 7 pounds on the
average. As a result of the slower growth rate following age 2,
most 3 and 4 year olds seem to eat less food. While causing alarm
in some parents, the change in food intake is normal. Children do
not eat less food but rather they eat fewer calories per pound of
body weight. The decrease growth rate requires less calories to
build their developing muscles, bones, and nerves. Although
normal children follow the same growth pattern, there are wide
individual variations. A child with a slow growth rate may
continue to gain in height and weight until age 20 while a child
with a fast growth rate may complete full growth by 16 years of
age.

Physical development results from the interaction between
individual factors of heredity and environmental forces. Abnormal
growth patterns often reflect this interaction. A striking
illustration of this effect is the failure to thrive syndrome in
which children suffering from prolonged neglect or abuse simply
stop growing. In these children, psychological stress produced by
their social environment causes the pituitary gland to stop
secreting growth hormones. When the environmental stress is
alleviated, and the child receives care, affection, and
stimulation, growth resumes often at a rate that enables catch-up
growth to occur. In body growth, brain growth, and all other
aspects of physical and psychological development, genes and
environment collaborate to produce normal development. Physical
developments are affected by the environment no less than
psychological ones. A healthy environment is necessary for normal
growth of the body, brain, and nervous system.

The brain continues to grow rapidly during the preschool
period. At age 2, the child's brain has reached 55% of its adult
size; by six years of age it has grown to more than 90% of its
adult size (Tanner, 1978). While brain growth during this period
is often uneven, most has occurred before 4 to 4.5 years of age.
There appears to be a spurt in growth at age 2 followed by a
major decrease in growth rate between 5 and 6 years of age. The
increase in brain size reflects changes in the organization and
size of nerve cells rather than an increase in the number of
cells. The growth also reflects an increase in the number of
glial cells that feed and support the nerve cells and to the
increasing myelination of nerve fibers. Myelin is the coating
around nerve fibers that serves to channel impulses along the
fibers and to reduce the random spread of impulses between
adjacent fibers, thus helping the nervous system to function
quickly and accurately.

In appearance the human brain consists of two symmetrical
hemispheres that specialize in different functions. The left
hemisphere controls verbal, reasoning, and mathematical skills,
while the right hemisphere specializes in nonverbal skills such
as spatial ability, perception of patterns and melodies, and the
expression and recognition of emotion.

Motor Development

There are significant advances in motor control during the
preschool period. These advances depend both on physical
maturation of brain and body systems and on the increasing skill
that comes through practice. They involve both the large muscles
such as those used in running, jumping and climbing, and the
small muscles such as those used in drawing and tying a knot.
Several factors contribute to the growth in motor development. In
the first instance, this development reflects the gradual
transition from the reflex behavior of the newborn to the
voluntary actions of the preschooler. A second factor is the
child's increasing ability to accurately perceive body size,
shape and position of its parts. Increasing bilateral
coordination, the coordination of the two halves of the body,
also contributes to increased motor performance. Virtually every
motor skill requires some sort of cooperation between the two
sides of the body, moving in some kind of alternatively timed
relationship.

The capacity to perform activities as walking, running, and
jumping does not necessarily imply the ability to perform them
skillfully or smoothly. For example, the young toddler's steps
are awkward. Yet by the end of toddlerhood, walking becomes a
skilled activity. The stride lengthens, speed increases, balance
stabilizes, and the child can walk for long periods without
resting. By the age of 4, the child's walk is essentially the
same as the adult's. In most cases the development of a motor
skill involves the gradual integration of existing movements into
a smooth, continuous pattern. In other cases new movements must
be acquired. For example learning to throw a ball skillfully
involves the integration of existing movements and the
acquisition of new ones.

In contrast to large muscle skills, small or fine muscle
skills refer to the use of hands and fingers in the manipulation
of objects. Also known as eye-hand coordination, fine motor
control is the ability to coordinate or regulate the use of the
eyes and the hands together in efficient, precise, and adaptive
movements. This coordination enables the development of a wide
variety of skills including writing, drawing, and the
manipulation of small objects and or instruments. Preschool
children learn to manipulate objects through visual feedback
which indicate whether or not they are doing what the child wants
the objects to be doing. Thus the preschool period is an
important time for the development of manipulation skills which
in turn prepare children to deal successfully with the challenges
of primary school.

Differences in motor development are striking and some
children are simply better coordinated, stronger and more
athletic than others. What accounts for these individual
differences which tend to persist throughout the life-span? Genes
unquestionably play a role and evidence suggests that identical
twins are more alike than fraternal twins in their performance of
motor skills during the preschool years. Nutrition is also
critical and children who have been undernourished for long
period of time are likely to be retarded in their motor
development. The capacity to catch up with their better nourished
agemates depends on the duration, severity, and timing of the
nutritional deficiency. Experience and opportunities to practice
both the large muscle and fine muscle skills also contributes to
differences in the development and functioning of these skills.

In addition to these factors, there appear to be consistent
gender differences in physical development throughout the early
childhood period. On the average, girls are physically more
mature while boys are physically more muscular. Motor differences
are also apparent and boys on the average have larger muscles
than girls which enables them to run faster, jump farther, and
climb higher. Girls seem to be more advanced in other aspects of
motor development particularly in manipulation skills such as
using scissors and fastening buttons. They are also ahead in
large muscle activities that require coordination rather than
strength such as skipping, hopping, and balancing on one foot.
Despite these gender differences, there is a striking similarity
in the overall pattern of children's physical and psychological
development during the preschool years.

Perceptual Development

While the ability to see, hear, and integrate sensory
information is well established by six months of age, more
complex and less obvious perceptual abilities develop throughout
early childhood. For example, precision of visual concepts such
as shape and size increases. As a results of these evolving
perceptual mechanisms, a child correctly observes an object's
size and shape regardless of the angle at which it is perceived.
While such mechanisms are present in infancy, they lack accuracy.
Infants may know that a distant object takes up less visual field
than a closer object, they must learn how much less. This type of
learning occurs through active and lively exploration of the
environment and is critical in the development of accurate size,
shape, and distance perception.

Another aspect of perception often taken for granted is the
ability to interpret pictorial representations of objects and
people in the environment. Research indicates that 3 year olds
respond appropriately to depth cues such as shading and the
convergence of lines. Sensitivity to such cues, however, improves
with age. The ability to obtain accurate information from
pictures reflects children's eye movements fixation patterns.
Adults use only leaping eye movements to sweep around the picture
as a whole, and short eye movements when concentrating on
particular details. By contrast, young preschool children tend to
have shorter eye movements and focus their gaze to small areas
near the middle or edge thus ignoring or missing much of the
information available.

The study of children's art provides some insight into the
integration of their growing perceptual, cognitive and motor
abilities. The 2.5 year old grasps a crayon in his hand and
scribbles while the 4 year old can draw a recognizable human form
know as the "tadpole person." The tadpole person is
characterized by a big head, sticks for legs, and no body. The
transition from drawing scribbles to the tadpole person usually
occurs sometime between the 3rd and 4th year. Increased motor
control and eye-hand coordination is one of the factors involved
in this achievement. Drawing skills undergo a second transition
sometime between the 4th and 5th year and the tadpole person is
transformed into a complete person with a body as well as a head.
Like the preschool child themselves, their art is delightfully
full of life, energy, and creativity. According to one
psychologist's review

A summit of artistry is achieved at the end of the preschool
period... Drawings by youngsters of this age are
characteristically colorful, balanced, rhythmic, and expressive,
conveying something of the range and the vitality associated with
artistic mastery... And the often striking products reinforce a
general notion of the child as a young artist--an individual
participating in a meaningful way in processes of creation,
elaboration, and self-expression. (Gardner, 1980, pg. 11)

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT: PARADOXES OF THE PRESCHOOL MIND

For decades, Piaget's descriptions of young children's
thinking dominated exploration of the preschooler's mental
development. According to Piaget, children's language acquisition
reflects their emerging capacity for representational thought.
The ways in which children think about the world, however, are
still primitive -- dreams come from street lamps, we think with
our ears, clouds are alive, and the sun follows us when we move.
Piaget proposed that 3-, 4-, and 5- year old children make errors
because they are still unable to engage in true mental
operations. This type of thinking therefore was termed
"preoperational." According to Piaget, the key feature
of preschool thinking is that children can only focus their
attention on one salient aspect at a time. This limitation is
overcome at 6 or 7 years of age, when the transition to concrete
operational thinking emerges. When this occurs, children are able
to combine, separate, and transform information mentally in a
logical manner. They know that the sun does not follow them and
dreams do not come from street lamps.

Preoperational intelligence differs in many ways from the
thinking of older children and adults and is sometimes puzzling
and confusing to parents and caregivers. According to Piaget,
preoperational thinking not only lacks logic but it is also
egocentric. This kind of self-centeredness is characterized by a
4 year-old's statement; "Look Mommy, the moon follows me
wherever I go." Another characteristic is known as
complexive thinking, a chaining of ideas in which each is linked
to the preceding or following one but the whole is not organized
into a unified concept. A third characteristic of preoperational
thought is the capacity for deferred imitation which allows
children to engage in pretend games.

Representation

The ability to pretend is linked to the capacity for
representation-the ability to think about the property of things
without having to act on them directly. The development of
representation is the cornerstone of all cognitive development
during the preoperational period. Recent research suggests that
preoperational intelligence develops through at least two
distinct levels, single representations which occur between the
ages of 2 and 4, and the second between 4 and 6 years when
children are capable of combining two or more representations
(Case and Khanna, 1981; Gelman 1978; Kenny 1983). The transition
from one of these levels to the next corresponds to a spurt in
brain development.

Observation of children in pretend play indicates that
children at 2 years of age can control only one representation at
a time. For example, in making a doll act as a person the child
can represent the person doing only one thing at a time- a child
walking, a man eating, a woman washing her hands. As the child
matures single representations begin to include a set of related
characteristics or actions. Children combine characteristics into
concrete social categories. For example, the child can make a
doctor doll perform a series of doctor activities such as putting
on a white coat, washing its hands, taking a temperature and
giving an injection.

At about 4 years of age children begin to understand some of
the interrelationships and complexities of social behavior. For
example, the category man includes as part of its meaning the
relation between men and women. Similarly they begin to
understand other social relationships such as husband-wife,
mother-father, mother-child and so forth. By relating various
representations the child now begins to understand relationships
in which variation in one facet of development depends upon
variation in another. This ability is reflected in the child's
new attempts to influence behavior. Strategies such as; "If
you let me play with your box, I'll let you play with my
bucket," are quite common among 4.5 year olds. The preschool
child is concerned with making sense of the people around them
and how they relate to each other.

Imitation

Imitation is one of the most important ways children learn
about the social world. During the sensorimotor period, before
the capacity for representation develops, infants can imitate an
action only at the moment it is observed. One result of
representation skills is the capacity for deferred imitation-the
process by which a child observes represented to themselves, and
then at a later time called up from memory and actively imitated.
Imitation also requires the ability to take another's point of
view. Piaget pointed out that children often make serious
mistakes by assuming that another person shares their own view of
things. Everyone who has spent time with young children is aware
of this egocentrism or the inability to take another's point of
view. Even when preschool children are shown another person's
perspective, they cannot keep it in mind and coordinate it with
their own. They are not selfish but simply captives of their own
viewpoint.

As cognitive skills increase, perspective-taking skills
improve. At 2 and 3 years of age, children can take someone
else's perspective only in the sense that they can understand a
characteristic. By 4 and 5 years, children are able to understand
the difference between another person's perspective and their own
as long as they need to keep track of only one or two simple
concrete factors. Thus, by 4 or 5 years of age, most children
have taken a major step away from egocentrism.

Memory

In order to understand another's perspective, the child must
be able to remember. Memory is the ability to encode information,
store it, and retrieve it. There are two kinds of memory, namely
short-term and long-term. Short-term, or the working memory,
processes information retrieved within a few seconds or minutes
of its being encoded. Preschoolers can use both short-term and
long-term memory. For example when they have heard a brief list
of words or seen a small group of pictures presented by an
experimenter, 4-and 5-year-olds can often recall them immediately
after presentation as well as older children can. Their long-term
memory is often quite amazing.

Early development is characterized by changes in memory that
are related to changes in cognitive development including; the
increasing ability to focus attention, the ability to connect
ideas with each other in a more logical way, and the ability to
devise strategies for remembering. Although memory improves
throughout childhood, important developmental changes take place
during the preschool years. Just as with perspective taking, a
major advance in memory abilities seems to begin at about 4 or 5
years when children start to recall items of some complexity and
when they begin to monitor and manipulate them own memories.

Play

Preschool children love to play and they spend hours building
and knocking down towers, they play house, and act out stories
with their playmates. Play in infancy consists mainly of
imitations of repeated actions sometimes with variations. In the
preschool years, play expands into much of the child's life.
Preschoolers love to play games that test and fine-tune their
mastery of their bodies-running, climbing, swinging, throwing.
They like to build things with mud, sand or blocks and they love
to pretend. They make believe about all kinds of things everyday
concerns, new things they have learned, and imagined adventure.

During the preschool years, children gradually play less by
themselves and more with other children. At 2 years of age,
solitary play is common and social interaction with other
children remains simple. Parallel play is often observed in 2
year olds and becomes common by age 3. In parallel play a child
is influenced by the activities of other children but they do not
actually cooperate in accomplishing a task. Both children may be
playing with sand and imitating one another's activities, but
they are unlikely to work together to build the same castle.

With an increase in thinking abilities, the complexity of
children's solitary and social play also increases. At about 4
years of age cooperative play begins to predominate. During this
form of play several children will create a city of blocks or
play a game in which each child takes the role of a family member
and together they act out the daily events. The content of play
assumes a new level of understanding and the child begins to play
games with simple rules. At any age, children's problems and
concerns are reflected in their play. Play provides a time when
children can control things themselves.

Piaget's perspective on the preschool child's development
places the child at the centre of his or her universe. Through
active interaction, exploration, and observation of the
environment, the child actively creates his or her own learning.
Play facilitates the transition to higher levels of cognitive
development; the "as if" nature of play allows children
to perform actions that are more developmentally advanced than
those they can realistically achieve. Play fosters a sense of
self-esteem and competence, supporting and reinforcing the
child's capacity for effective action. As a consequence, in play
a child is always above daily behaviour; in play "it is as
though he were a head taller than himself."

Complex Thinking

Because play is mostly under the child's control, it clearly
indicates some of the paradoxes in children's thinking processes.
Preschool children usually have difficulty controlling or
coordinating their thoughts. Even when they are capable of
representational relations, they can deal with only simple, crude
connections between ideas, so their thoughts tend to wander. One
result of these difficulties is a thought pattern known as
complexive thinking--the stringing together of ideas without a
unifying concept or system. While there are connections between
ideas, a single concept that ties them all together is lacking.

Personification, the attribution of human characteristics to
inanimate objects, is often characteristic of children's
thinking. Having only recently learned to separate their own
actions from those of other people or objects, preschool children
are not yet able to distinguish clearly between properties of
objects and characteristic of people.

In summary, during the preschool years, many
cognitive-developmental changes take place. Before this period,
infants do not distinguish between themselves and their actions
on the world. Objects exist only when the baby is acting on them
or perceiving them. At about age 2 children become capable of
representation, of thinking about the properties of things
without having to act on them directly. This capacity marks the
first level of the preoperational period. At this level, the
child can deal with only one representation-one idea or thought
at a time. At the second level of the preoperational period,
beginning at about age 4, children develop the ability to deal
mentally with more complex things. During the preschool years the
child moves through these two levels, building increasingly
complex and sophisticated schemes. The egocentric, complexive,
magical thinking of infancy gradually gives way to more logical
thinking-perspective taking, a better memory, and an ability to
separate oneself mentally from one's immediate surroundings.

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

A dramatic accomplishment during this period is the
acquisition of language. In late infancy children learn to say a
few individual words and, by paying attention to context, they
can also understand some of the language used around them. At
approximately 2 years of age, their ability to use language
suddenly increases rapidly. The size of the vocabulary increases
and they begin to string words together in short sentences. The
ability to represent objects, people and events through language,
develops at about the same time as representation in children's
imitation, play and other actions. While representation is not
required in uttering simple individual words, it is neccessary
for organizing words into simple statements.

Despite intensive research, the process of language
acquisition remains elusive, and no single theory has
sufficiently uncovered its mystery. What is evident is that the
growth of children's vocabulary and their increased ability to
use complex sentence structures accompanied by a corresponding
growth in their ability to engage in conversation appropriately
tailored to the listener's needs, requires both participation in
responsive human interactions and exposure to a rich language
environment (Bruner, J. 1983). Most research on language
development has focused on how children acquire the rules that
govern our use of language.

The two types of rules that have been most investigated are
pragmatics, rules for communicating in social contexts, and
grammatical rules for combining words. Many of the language rules
that children learn amount to social conventions and are so
automatic for adults that we are not even aware of them. In adult
speech, for instance, expressive devices, such as sarcasm, tell
the listener not to take what is being said literally. Another
device is the use of a question as an indirect request. Because
of egocentric thought and social inexperience, young children do
not fully understand the indirect requests. For children, the
simple pragmatic functions of language are often more important
than the specific meanings of sentences. When English speaking
preschool children meet in small groups with preschool children
who speak another language, they may play together for days
without seeming to notice their language differences. An English
speaking 4 year old walked up to a French speaking 3 year old and
spoke in English. The 3 year old answered in French and they
proceeded to play, acting as if they both understood, taking
turns, nodding in agreement, and so forth. This interaction
emphasized the similarity of pragmatic rules between languages
while the meaning of words is generally obvious from the context
and from other nonverbal cues such as tone of voice.

Another conversation convention that is beyond the ability of
a young preschool child is the rule that what is being said
should be interesting to the listener as well as to the speaker.
Because children in the early preoperational period are prisoners
of their own viewpoint, they think that what interests them
interests everyone. This egocentrism leads children to endless
self-reporting and the assumption that other people know what
they themselves know. They frequently conduct a conversation as
though it were a monologue, changing the subject without seeming
to be aware of the listener's response. At about 4 years of age,
children begin to master some of the more complex pragmatic rules
that were so difficult when they were younger. For example, a
well-documented developmental change takes place in pragmatic
skill with the rules for polite forms of request. To understand
what is polite, a child must have the cognitive ability to
consider the other person's viewpoint.

Children must also learn the grammar and the rules for forming
words, phrases, and sentences. They must be able to express such
states and relations as possession, negation, past action and
conditional action. One of the most basic concepts is
organization of words into sentences. In order to distinguish one
sentence from another, each group of words in a sentence has a
certain pitch, and stress, so that listeners can distinguish one
sentence from the next. English speakers generally drop the pitch
at the end of a statement and raise it at the end of questions.
Most children recognize and can infer meaning from intonation
patterns sometime in the first year of life. This enormous
accomplishment reflects the special adaptation of the human
species for acquiring language.

How do children learn these complicated rules which are unique
for each language? Some psycho-linguistic researchers believe
that we inherit species-specific strategies, or operating
principles, for perceiving speech. These language operating
principles are similar to the newborn's rule for visual scanning.
In a similar fashion, young children listen to the language in
ways that help to discover its meaning. These strategies for
perceiving speech make it easier to understand the rules of
speech production. Three important operating principles have
helped to explain two of the best known characteristic of
children's early speech- telegraphic speech and overregulation
(Slobin,1973, 1979). These operating principles include paying
attention to the endings of words, paying attention to the order
of words and word segments, and avoiding exceptions to language
rules.

Telegraphic speech refers to a child's tendency to use only
the two or three most important words to express meaning. For
example, a child says; "Mommy rice," rather than
"Mommy, I would like to have some rice." The average
length of sentences steadily increase during the period from 2 to
6 years. Telegraphic speech in different languages has many
differences as well as similarities. For example in virtually all
languages, children's telegraphic speech is characterized by
deletions of certain kinds of words such as articles ("the,
a, an), prepositions (in, on, under, through), conjunctions (and,
but, because, when) and parts of nouns and verbs that indicate
relatively subtle changes in meaning. Since telegraphic sentences
are often ambiguous, interpretation often relies on contextual
information.

The operating principle of avoiding exceptions to language
rules, results in overregularization as children apply a language
rule to a word or phrase that does not follow the rule.
Statements such as "I goed out and throwed my ball at those
gooses" are common from English speaking children at this
stage of language development.

Children speaking the same language seem to acquire rules in a
similar order. Rules that are simple and used often are acquired
first followed by an understanding of and an ability to combine
more complex rules. Because the complexity of a given grammatical
form differs from one language to another, the age at which
children master the rule for a particular form depends partly on
the complexity of the language. Some grammatical forms that are
not particularly difficult to understand may enter a child's
speech late because they are difficult to hear. Because young
children can only listen to language, they often make mistakes
due to the way a word or phrase sounds.

Preschool children are obsessed with language. They listen to
it carefully and chatter away for hours on end. By the age of six
or seven they have acquired and mastered most of the rules for
speaking in their native language. This amazing feat suggests
that there is a critical time, or sensitive period for acquiring
language that begins at one or two years of age, peaks in the
later preschool years, and continues to some degree until 13 to
15 years of age. This special human sensitivity for learning
language in the preschool years seems to correspond to certain
systematic changes in the brain and in the rest of the nervous
system at about this time, which are closely related to speech.
The best documented of these changes are called myelogenetic
cycles. Each cycle is a period in which myelin forms in a
particular system within the brain. There are three myelogenetic
cycles in the system that are important to language (Lecours,
1975). The first cycle, which occurs in the primitive brain (the
brain stem and the limbic system) starts before birth and ends
early in infancy. It seems to be associated with the development
of babbling. The second cycle, which begins around birth and
continues until 3.5 to 4.5 years of age, takes place in a more
advanced part of the brain. This cycle appears to accompany the
development of speech in infancy and the early preschool years.
The third cycle takes place in the association areas of the
cortex of the brain, which play a central role in intelligence.
Although myelination of these areas begins at birth, it is not
fully completed until age 15 or later.

Language develops very efficiently for the great majority of
children. Parents and caregivers can help sustain natural
language development by providing environments full of language
development opportunities. With young children, for example, one
helpful style of interaction is a highly responsive one, in which
the adult lets the child decide what to talk about, expands on
that topic, works hard to figure out what the child means,
suggests new activities, and pays more attention to what the
child wants to say than whether it is being said correctly. An
optimal language teacher assumes the role of a cooperative
conversational partner rather than taking an explicitly didactic
or directive role.

The studies on which this picture is based have mostly been
carried out in middle-class, English speaking families, a
cultural group within which responsive, nondirective, child
centered parenting is considered desirable. In this group
children and adults have relatively equal social status, and
children are expected from a very early age to function as
conversational partners (Cazden, 1988; Snow, 1989).

In other cultures, the rules governing parent-child
interaction and parental roles are quite different. In Samoa, for
example, social status is closely connected to age, and the idea
of engaging a child in conversation as a social equal would seem
unnatural. Among the Kaluli of Papua, New Guinea, it is
considered better to ask children to talk as adults about adult
matters than to "descend to their level" in talking to
them. In these cultures we would not expect the responsive style
of talk that facilitates language acquisition for American
children to function similarly.

Language teaching is most useful to young children when it is
presented in the context of their own activities and attempts at
expression. Older preschool children, however, can use language
to learn language and they no longer need to encounter each new
language skill within a meaningful context. Furthermore, they
become increasingly capable of learning intentionally, of
attending to and benefitting from explicit instruction, and of
using models as sources of learning. At this stage simply
responding to the child's interests might not be sufficient to
stimulate optimal language development. Talking about a wide
variety of topics, modelling an enriched vocabulary, engaging in
talk about talk itself, discussing word meanings, challenging
children to explain themselves and to justify their own thinking,
setting higher standards for comprehensibility, and explicitly
correcting errors: all these are important in the language
development of 4, 5, and 6 year old children. Children at this
age range are also expected to control certain language-related
literacy skills that probably emerge from being read to, from
experience in looking at books with adults, and from experience
with letters, with pencils and paper, and with observation of
adult literacy activities. Parents and other caregivers foster
such skills when they can organize the environment to provide and
encourage the use of pre-literacy learning materials.

SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Social development is a two-sided process in which children
become increasingly integrated into the larger social community
as distinct individuals. The process of acquiring the standards,
values, and knowledge of communities and society is known as
socialization. The way in which individual children develop a
characteristic sense of themselves and a unique way to think and
feel is known as personality formation (Damon, 1983).
Socialization which begins as soon as a child is born is
especially important during early childhood as the first
understanding of the child's community is constructed. It is a
process that requires the active participation of both adults and
children. Caregivers set expectations for children's proper
behavior as well as the rewards or punishments for their conduct.
Caregivers also select and create the social contexts within
which children experience their environments and learn the rules
of behavior. Children are active participants in this process.
What they learn depends in part on their interpretation of their
environments and on what they select as important from the
barrage of available information.

Children need to understand the social categories, roles,
rules and expectations of their families and communities in order
to function in a social world. Effective socialization assures
that if a child comes to consider herself a girl, she will
acquire the appropriate behavior for girls as defined by a
particular social group. In order to understand the requirements
of this role, however, she must have certain skills and
abilities.

For each child, the combination of characteristics that shape
personality is unique since the particular mix of genetic
endowment and personal experience is never completely shared with
another human being. Some elements of personality are obvious
immediately after birth as when infants display a particular
temperament. Personality is more than individual temperament as
it includes the way people conceive of themselves and their
characteristic style of interacting with others.

Thus individual personality development and socialization are
two sides of a single developmental coin. Social development
during the preschool years is closely linked to achievements in
cognitive and linguistic skills. All the feedback received from
the social environment is crucial to development of a sense of
self. One of the most remarkable facts about social development
is the extent to which children adopt as necessary the rules
defined by their social group. By the time children reach their
6th birthday a great deal has been learned about the roles they
are expected to play and how to behave in accordance with them,
how to control anger and aggressive feelings, and how to respect
the rights of others. How does all this learning take place and
what are the elements that enter into it?

Social Identity

While psychologists agree that socialization occurs by
identification -- a psychological process that contributes to a
sense of who one is and who one wants to be -- they disagree
about the mechanisms by which it is achieved. Four proposed
mechanisms have figured most prominently in our understanding of
this basic process: differentiation, affiliation, imitation and
social learning, and cognition. According to Freud, children
recognize that some objects in the external world are like
themselves and they therefore "endeavor to mold the ego
after one that had been taken as a model." In other words,
having noticed that a particular adult or older child is somehow
similar to themselves, children "identify with" that
person and strive to acquire his or her qualities. Identification
follows a different course for males and females. Male
identification requires differentiation from the mother, while
female identification requires continued affiliation with the
mother.

Social learning theorists have a different perspective on how
children identify and adopt adult roles. According to their
beliefs, the process of identification is not driven by inner
conflict but occurs through observation and imitation. Behavior
in their view is shaped by the environment and children observe
that male and female behavior is different. Further, children
learn that boys and girls are rewarded differently and choose to
behave in sex-appropriate behaviors that will lead to rewards.
Thus the basic assumption of social-learning theorists is that
sex-appropriate behaviors are shaped by the distribution of
rewards and punishments in the environment.

The belief that a child's ability to perceive the world is
central to socialization is the basis of the
cognitive-developmental approach to sex-role acquisition proposed
by Lawrence Kohlberg (1966). In this view the crucial factor in
sex-role identification is the child's developing ability to
categorize themselves as "boys" or "girls."
This process begins at about 2 years of age as children acquire a
distinctive sense of self and the beginning of complex concepts.
According to this viewpoint, once formed, children's conceptions
of their own sex are difficult to reverse and are maintained
regardless of their social environments.

In an attempt to address these conflicting theories about
sex-role identification, psychologists have sought to trace the
developing relationship between the earliest signs of sex-typed
behavior and children's earliest concepts of what adults mean
when the label "girl" or "boy" is applied.
The existing evidence suggests that during the preschool years
children gradually develop a well-articulated concept of what it
means to be a boy or girl in their culture and their behavior is
shaped by this knowledge. Between 2 and 6 years children are
still piecing this conceptual structure together. Both biological
and social factors seem to play important roles in promoting both
sex-appropriate behaviors and the development of basic sex-role
categories themselves.

While developmental theorists disagree about the caregivers's
power to shape final outcomes, they do agree on two points
concerning the children's discovery of social categories and
initial mastery of behavior appropriate to their sex and include:
(1) children conduct some kind of mental "matching"
operation that allows them to isolate key features that they
share with others; (2) later ideas of sex-appropriate behavior
are closely tied to children's ability to categorize, observe,
and imitate. By whatever route, children of 5 or 6 have acquired
the idea that they are members of one sex or the other. Children
use these abilities to learn a vast array of other roles and
about the possible roles they may play in the future.

Self Regulation

In the process of acquiring a basic sense of identity,
children also learn which behaviors are considered good and those
that are considered bad. They are expected not only to learn and
adopt the rules of proper behavior, but also to follow these
rules without constant supervision. Piaget proposed that
children's beliefs grow out of their experience of the
restriction placed on them by powerful adults. From the child's
perspective, older people announce the rule, compel conformity,
and decide what is right and wrong. According to Piaget as
children enter middle childhood and begin to interact with their
peers outside of situations directly controlled by adults, the
morality of constraint gives way to a more autonomous
morality--one that is based on an understanding that rules are
arbitrary agreements to be challenged and even changed, if those
governed by them agree.

By the end of infancy children are sensitive to society's
standards of good and bad and can begin to anticipate adults'
reactions and plan their own actions accordingly. Internalization
of adult standards occurs when children both want to conform to
adult standards and can anticipate their reactions. In order to
behave according to social standards, children must acquire the
capacity to control their own behavior. Self-control includes
both the ability to inhibit action and to carry through actions
according to preestablished rules even when one does not wish to
do so. Preschoolers are well known for their lack of self-control
and the consequent need for supervision. In so far as behavior is
simply a direct response to the environment, they are being
controlled "from the outside." The direct response to
being hit is to be angry and hit back. Children who inhibit the
impulse to hit back and seek an alternative response are
displaying a degree of self-control. Young children's growing
ability to estimate the tradeoffs implied by a change from
direct, immediate reactions to indirect, mediated, thoughtful
ones is made possible in part by their expanding time frame and
their increased understanding of the proper forms of behavior.
Children who do not understand short-term versus long-term cannot
measure "short-term" versus "long-term" gain.

During the preschool period children begin to spend
significant amounts of time interacting with their peers. Through
this process children must learn to be accepted by their social
group. In so doing they must at times inhibit their anger when
their goals are thwarted; at other times their personal desires
will be subordinated for the good of the group. Learning to
control aggression and to help others are two of the central
processes in preschool social development.

Aggression and Prosocial Behavior

Shortly after birth, children begin to display the beginnings
of both aggression and socially constructive behavior. The
earliest signs of aggression are the angry responses of newborns
when their rhythmic sucking has been interrupted. The first signs
of helpful social behavior appear just as early when newborns
reacting to the cries of other babies start to cry themselves. It
is believed that this contagious crying is the earliest form of
empathy, sharing of another's feelings which is the foundation
for a variety of helpful or prosocial behaviors.

Although aggression is a behavior difficult to define, it
generally refers to situations where one person commits an action
that hurts another. As children mature, two forms of aggression
are apparent, namely instrumental aggression and hostile
aggression. Instrumental aggression is directed at obtaining
something desirable, such as threatening or hitting another child
to obtain a wanted object. Hostile aggression is more
specifically aimed at hurting another, either for revenge or as a
way of establishing dominance. Observations across a variety of
cultural settings suggest that by 2 years of age children are
concerned with ownership rights. The possession itself as well as
the possibility of winning were new elements in their
interactions. Between 3 and 6 years, the expression of aggression
undergoes several other related changes. While physical tussles
over possessions decrease, the amount of verbal aggression such
as threats or insults increases. During this stage,
person-oriented or hostile aggression where one child attempts to
hurt another also appears.

It is a commonly held assumption that punishment suppresses
children's aggressive behavior. Some child development
specialists argue that parents who control children's behavior
through physical punishment or threats of raw power actually
create more aggressive children. Others have suggested that when
punishment is used as a means of socialization, it is most likely
to suppress aggressive behavior when the child identifies
strongly with the person who does the punishing and when it is
employed consistently. If punishment is used inconsistently, it
may provoke children to further aggression. Since young children
use aggression to gain attention, one strategy is to ignore the
aggression or to pay attention to children only when they are
engaged in cooperative behavior. Another strategy is engage
children in a rational discussion making them aware of the
feelings of the aggressed. In spite of the diversity of these
strategies, the most successful techniques for teaching
self-control of aggression go beyond mere suppression of
aggressive impulses. Rather, children are requested to stop their
direct attacks and consider other ways to behave.

In addition to aggressive behaviors, prosocial behaviors such
as altruism, cooperation, and empathy are common among preschool
children. A major stimulus for prosocial behavior is empathy, the
sharing of another's emotional response. Although infants seem to
be born with an ability to empathize, like other developmental
tasks, this capacity increases with age. Preschool children
become skilled at interpreting and responding appropriately to
the distress of others. Research seems to suggest that the
development of empathy in the preschool period results from the
child's increasing command of language and other symbols
(Hoffman, 1975). Language allows children to empathize with a
wider range of feelings that are more subtly expressed, as well
as with people who are not present. Indirect information gained
through stories and pictures enables children to empathize with
people they have never met.

Caregivers, anxious to encourage prosocial behavior, have
developed many commonly used strategies to promote this goal. Two
methods that seem to be helpful include explicit modeling in
which adults behave in ways they desire the child to imitate, and
induction, giving explanations that appeal to children's pride,
their desire to be grownup and their concern for others. In
reality, strategies to increase prosocial behavior do not occur
in isolation from efforts to decrease aggressive behavior. Rather
a great variety of techniques are likely to occur in combination
with each other, and in the process a diversity of socialization
patterns is created.

Factors Effecting Early Development

Theories of child development are challenged by the variation
in preschool children's thinking. For some, the unevenness can be
explained by differences in children's familiarity with specific
task settings. Biologically oriented theorists argue that changes
in the brain's structure are the major cause of unevenness in
preschool thought. At the start of the preschool period, the
brain has achieved 50 percent of its adult weight. By the age of
6, the brain will have grown to 90 percent of its weight. Within
this overall process of growth, myelination -- the process by
which neurons become covered by myelin, which is a sheath of
fatty cells that stabilizes the neurons -- appears to play a
particularly important role in preschoolers' cognitive
development.

In light of these varying perspectives, the position most
reasonable to accept, however, is that the context-specific
organization of the child's environment is constantly interacting
with the biological properties of the child, which themselves
develop at different rates. Appreciating the immense variation of
these two diverse sources, one from the social world of human
existence and one from biology, we can begin to understand the
range and variability that characterizes development of the
preschool child. In this ecological view of development, the
child's environment consists of four interrelated systems which
include the nuclear and extended family; the immediate community
of peers and neighbors; the institutional community of schools
and other social service facilities; and a cultural ethos
consisting of values, beliefs, and rituals. The child's
development is conditioned by the frequency and complexity of
interactions within each one of these systems. For example,
cognitive and social development seem to be most affected by
factors of the home environment, including the caregivers'
self-image, self-esteem, confidence, and emotional responsivity;
the restrictions and types of discipline imposed on the child;
the language stimulation provided; and the child's opportunities
for exploratory play and appropriate play materials. Factors in
the immediate community impacting on the child's development may
consist of community attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions
regarding the ideal child and childrearing patterns that foster
such development.

Until recently, emphasis was placed on identifying and
overcoming deficiencies of the "deprived" environments
that characterized the rural and urban poor. Disadvantaged
environments have been thought to lack the necessary variety and
quality of human interactions as well as the necessary objects
and events for fostering a child's early development. Poor
quality verbal interaction and absence of toys and were
frequently cited as detrimental to a child's language abilities
and visual-discrimination. More recently, however, the strengths
of the environments characterizing the poor which are capable of
fostering and promoting early development have been appreciated.
Such features include, for example,

Opportunities for play with peers and older children
with minimal adult interference enhancing the development of
self-reliance, self-control, cooperation, empathy and a sense of
belonging.

Exposure to multiple teaching styles, with emphasis on
modeling, observation, and imitation.

Presence of a rich cultural tradition of games, toys,
songs, and stories that provide a culture-specific context for
language acquisition.

Realization is growing that within so-called deprived
environments, children learn a different set of skills that are
functional in their home environments but that may not be valued
by formal institutions such as the school system. In the design
of culturally appropriate, community-based early intervention
programmes, it is critical therefore, to explore, mobilize, and
build on these inherent strengths. The recognition of strengths
within "deprived" environments sheds light on the
factors giving rise to "invulnerable," or
stress-resistant, children.

Past investigations that focused only on vulnerabilities and
sources of failure prevented an understanding of the ways in
which protective mechanisms shield children from risk. In the
past decade, efforts to understand "invulnerable"
children have begun. Garmezey has proposed three categories of
protective factors, which include (1) personality characteristics
of the child; (2) a supportive, stable, and cohesive family unit;
and (3) external support systems that enhance coping skills and
project positive values.

Recently, investigators have identified the child's
"sense of self" as a key determinant of successful
outcomes. It is suggested that children with positive feelings of
self-esteem, mastery, and control can more easily negotiate
stressful experiences. These children in turn elicit more
positive experiences from their environment. They show initiative
in task accomplishment and relationship formation. Even in
stressed families, the presence of one good relationship with a
parent reduces psychosocial risk for children. For older
children, the presence of a close, enduring relationship with an
external support figure may likewise provide a protective
function. A child with a positive self-concept seeks,
establishes, and maintains the kinds of supportive relationships
and experiences that promote successful outcomes. These successes
enhance the child's self-esteem and sense of mastery, which leads
to further positive experiences and relationships. The cycle of
success can be as self-perpetuating as the cycle of failure.

In spite of these strengths, it is clear that the
developmental costs of poverty are high and that poverty is a
marker for potential psychosocial risk factors. Children in
poverty are exposed more frequently to a clustering of such risk
factors as medical illness, poor nutrition, family stress, low
education levels, inadequate social-service support, and
nonstimulating social environments. The costs can be measured in
terms of school drop-out, unemployment, delinquency, and the
intergenerational perpetuation of failure and poverty.

These stress factors additionally or
"synergistically" interact with the child's inherent
strengths and vulnerabilities to shape outcomes. A transactional
model developed by Sameroff and Chandler has become widely used
to help define developmental outcomes. According to this
framework, child outcomes can only be interpreted by considering
the transaction between the content of the child's behaviour and
the context in which the behaviours are manifested.
Characteristics of the child shape its response to the
environment. These interactions in turn transform environmental
responsivity. Just as the child is shaped by the environment, so
is the environment modified by the child. The child brings a host
of attributes to the interaction, including; health and
nutritional status; temperament; and cognitive, language, and
social skills. The environment in turn brings specific
attributes. In an environment of poverty, more risk factors are
likely to be present. While adding considerable complexity to the
determinates of child outcomes, such a model also suggests an
opportunity for practical intervention strategies. Change in any
aspect of the child's differing environments can create positive
transformations in another.

The period of early childhood ends at the age of 6 or 7 years,
when children pass through the next biobehavioural shift and
assume the accompanying social roles and demands. Generally by
this age, children's brains have achieved a level of complexity
similar to adults. It is the age of formal schooling, and
children also gather with friends and peers beyond the family.
Developments in early childhood provide the essential preparation
for the new demands and opportunities to come.

In bringing this theoretical discussion to a close, it is
perhaps useful to conclude with the insight of a proverb,
"As the twig is bent, so grows the tree." If forces in
the environment bend a sapling long enough, the tree may become
so bent that its leaves cannot receive the sun's light, and it
will not flower and reproduce. Yet, if the forces bending the
tree cease or if a gardener stakes the tree upright, the only
lasting effect may be a slight bend in the trunk. The tree will
prosper and make a genuine contribution to its environment.